Jeffrey D. Sadow is an associate professor of political science at Louisiana State University Shreveport. If you're an elected official, political operative or anyone else upset at his views, don't go bothering LSUS or LSU System officials about that because these are his own views solely.
This publishes five days weekly with the exception of 7 holidays. Also check out his Louisiana Legislature Log especially during legislative sessions (in "Louisiana Politics Blog Roll" below).

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24.7.14

Recent
remarks by the leader of Louisiana’s legislative Democrats, state Rep. John Bel Edwards, not only
confirms he acts as one of the biggest gasbags in state politics, but also in
the process tried to sell a bill of goods no informed and thinking person would
buy.

Edwards snared an invitation to
speak to the media, no doubt as a tactic to make his campaign for governor anything
else but moribund, and proceeded to unload a slurry of drivel. He claimed the
current budgeting practices of Gov. Bobby
Jindal were designed to forestall a day of reckoning which the next
governor would have to address, mainly because of around $1 billion in funds
that he alleged would not reappear next year. He said he would address this by jettisoning
what he called outdated or ineffective tax breaks and by expanding Medicaid. He
railed against “privatization.” He termed himself a candidate of the middle, saying
that’s where governance needs to be.

All of which demonstrates that
after over six years in office, Edwards doesn’t seem to know much about how
Louisiana’s fiscal system works, covers that ignorance with large doses of
disingenuousness, and thinks he can fool a lot of people a lot of the time. The
“one-time money” claim illustrates all three tendencies. The amount to which he
refers is money used that does not come directly from the general fund or directly
from dedicated funds to dedicated purposes, yet he made it sound like it
dropped from the sky in order to fund continuing operations.

23.7.14

If Republican Rep. Bill Cassidy wishes to confirm his
conservative credentials in his contest to knock off Democrat Sen. Mary Landrieu, he should vote to end
welfare to big businesses and discrimination against private banks, and not
become what fellow Republican Rep. Charles Boustany has on the
issue of reauthorization of the U.S. Export-Import Bank.

Regarding the government concern,
Congress must decide soon on whether to allow the Bank a charter to continue,
for which Landrieu is all for. It provides loans, loan guarantees and insurance
policies for U.S. companies that export products abroad, as well as financing
help for some of their foreign customers. Cassidy has said he has not decided
what to do when the matter comes up, although he did vote for the previous
authorization.

Such doubt doesn’t exist in the
mind of Boustany, who penned
a full-throated defense of its operations for an establishmentarian website. In
it, he claimed that the bank proved helpful to small business and that it could
not compete against private lenders and therefore not only would not take
business from them but also was the only source for some businesses given
foreign regulatory environments, and that it turned a healthy $1 billion
profit. Landrieu
joined him in a news conference to reiterate that and trotted out a local
business owner to sing the Bank’s praises, underscoring that well over a
hundred Louisiana businesses got such loans.

22.7.14

The fact that student loan debt
might impose a greater burden than in the past on borrowers in Louisiana is a
function of the choices made by them rather than in erroneous public policy.

Statistics
show that nearly half of the class of 2012 in Louisiana graduated owing
something. The average debt load was about $22,789. Further, an estimated one
in 10 Louisiana graduates defaulted on federal student loan payments within two
years of entering the repayment period.

But it’s illogical to assert that
tuition
rates at Louisiana colleges contributed much to this. After all, with the
fourth lowest average tuition and fees rate in the country, in-state students
here had a bargain compared to their peers in most states. Add to this that
about a fifth of all college students in the state benefitted from a free ride
on tuition, or more, from the Taylor Opportunity Program for Students that pays
for tuition at state schools and in some cases even more, and it’s clear that
taxpayers were putting up more than they should have to supplement a tertiary
education to individuals who may not even stay in state once they graduated.

That’s only the direct cost. Because
the bond money for it was floated through the Louisiana Agricultural Finance
Authority, it deprived the use of that money for its purpose originally
intended, suppressing
boll weevil activity. This forced the state some years ago to spend extra money
it never should have had those funds not gone to the mill’s construction and
instead could have been used to prevent flaring of weevil infestations. And
since it used state workers in construction, most for tasks not even close to
their job descriptions or competencies, an untold amount of productivity in pursuing
state activities also was lost.

20.7.14

The kabuki generated between Gov. Bobby
Jindal and the Board of Elementary and
Secondary Education with its superintendent of education picked by it John
White continues with a string of announcements and an actual meeting between
Jindal and White, but the advantage in the conflict held by BESE remains the
same to the detriment of Jindal’s political effectiveness.

Last week, BESE made another
apparent concession, after having said
previously it would use state-derived questions for testing purposes, to
Jindal in that it would restart the test procurement process. Jindal has
ordered heightened scrutiny over that process, almost the only conceivable way
in which a governor can influence even the implementation of education policy
in the state as that policy-making is vested in the hands of BESE, because he
claims using a national test by definition imposes national content on the
state, even if it is not content but common standards being adopted by
Louisiana and most states that the test would evaluate the degree of their achievement.

But just as the previous request
really meant nothing granted, in that only the subject areas not covered by
national testing would use Louisiana questions and BESE indicated national
tests still would be used in English and mathematics, so also did this latest
offer also give nothing up to Jindal’s insistence that the national exam
developed by the Partnership for
Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers not be used for
this purpose. BESE officers and White proclaimed that they voluntarily
would start over, if allowed to immediately and wrap it up in three months,
the procurement process again – knowing that because PARCC had discussed giving
the exam to the state for its first year for free that it could come in with a
bid of zero and automatically win. Even if that didn’t happen, the officers –
whose offer antagonized the only three apparent (of 11 total members) BESE opponents
of the Common Core State Standards to which PARCC
is tied – said the winning bid had to be for a test allowing for comparisons
across states.

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